The Gissing Journal Volume XLII, Number 2, April 2006 “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” Commonplace Book Escape from Marriage: A Gissing Theme ROBERT L. SELIG Purdue University Calumet Thirty-one years ago, Gillian Tindall perceptively surveyed imaginative interconnections between the many bad marriages in Gissing’s novels and the two in his life (Tindall, 74-84, 86, 97-98, 99-100, 120, 136, 146, 151-52, 155-57, 158-67, 171, 174-76, 178-79, 181-92, 195-203, 207-13, 215-26, 237-39, 242, 246-47, 251-53, 255, 256). Yet no one has said much about a closely related issue: getting out of marriage. Gissing failed twice himself at complete escape, but some of his characters do better, and many try. A historical rather than just a biographical framework has special rele-vance here. The narrowness of England’s divorce laws spoiled many lives besides George Gissing’s. Gissing scholars all know about his marital troubles. Yet biographers and critics tend to stress his personal failings in relationships with women and not the inadequate divorce laws of his time. Very much to the point, Gissing once paid an enterprising sergeant of police to try to prove adultery by Nell, Gissing’s first wife—a self-destructive alcoholic ex-prostitute—so that he could divorce her (Collected Letters, II: 163, 164, 166, 171, 173). He had already separated from her informally, avoiding the expenses and delays of domestic court proceedings. Still, he did pay for her support (Collected Letters, II: 90). In England at this time—1883 and much later— adultery remained a husband’s only grounds for divorce. And without cyni- cal collusion, such sexual unfaithfulness was difficult to prove. Lacking Nell’s help, Gissing’s policeman failed (Collected Letters, II: 182). After her death, during his second bad marriage, this time to the mentally un- stable Edith Underwood Gissing, the novelist told the woman he loved, Gabrielle Fleury, that his wife’s repellent ways and unattractive looks ruled out adultery—his only hope for dissolving the marriage (Letters to Gabri- elle, 43-44). Yet he did try to investigate an anonymous tip that Edith had had “relations with some” other “man” (Diary, 509, 512). Nothing came of this, though. At his friend Morley Roberts’s suggestion, he next considered an easy divorce from the United States but decided that the prolonged required stay was not worth it for a divorce unrecognized in England. At last he persuaded Gabrielle to join him in an extra-legal union, although to save her reputation, they pretended to get married (Letters to Gabrielle, 43- 44, 107, “Introduction,” 14-15, Diary, 513). Three years later, Edith’s vio- lent craziness led to permanent hospitalization in an asylum—a further escape for Gissing (Halperin, 331, 360), though not, of course, the full freedom of divorce. In spite of his quarrels with Gabrielle’s ill and live-in mother and also his own emphysema leading to his death just a few years later, his non-marriage worked better than either of his legal ones (Letters to Gabrielle, “Introduction,” 15-16). Paradoxically, the hypothetical escape clause allowed by free union may have strengthened his ongoing commit- ment to his “wife” as something that always remained within his choice. In spite of occasional grumbling, he never even hinted at a wish to end this “marriage.” The stranglehold on marriage in England’s domestic courts illuminates not only Gissing’s life but at least half of his novels. We should not treat his fictional concern with escaping out of marriage as only an expression of his own unhappy wedlocks. The Church of England’s opposition to divorce remained embedded in late-Victorian law. Up until 1857, in fact, the Church actually ran England’s domestic courts. It and they forbade di- vorces even for adultery (Stetson, 6-7; Holcombe, 94). And the Church courts granted the rare escape of an annulment only for the most narrowly defined reasons: incest, total impotence, or pre-existing and incurable in- sanity. These courts also stigmatized as bastards the offspring of later mar- riages even after an annulment. And such hurtful behaviour as adultery, sodomy, bestiality, or physical abuse could justify no more than a legal separation (misleadingly called a “divorce a mensa et thoro,” from bed and board)—a strictly limited relief forbidding remarriage. A separated wife who lived with some other man became an adulteress in the eyes of the law and lost her right to an allowance, no matter how much her husband had wronged her. Then, too, ecclesiastical proceedings cost £300 to £500—a sum beyond most citizens (Holcombe, 94, 95). Until 1857 a private act of Parliament remained the only loophole for obtaining a divorce—one all but impossible for a wife. Yet even a husband first needed to get a legal separation from the old Church courts and legally to charge another man with adultery. Next a husband needed a divorce bill from the House of Lords. But its Bishop members managed such bills and always changed divorce into mere separation. The entire Lords had to 2 change it back again, the Commons had to agree, and the Queen had to approve. This long process cost £600 to £800—a ransom affordable only by rich men (Holcombe, 95-96). Enlightened mid-Victorians argued for reforms, but religious and social conservatives blocked them. Parliament passed instead the seriously enfee- bled Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. It did create secular courts—cheaper though still expensive—for divorces and also separations. Yet for seventy years after this, these newly empowered courts had to stick to the act’s old doctrines, taking back most of what it had seemed to give. A husband could now obtain a divorce—not just a separation—but only for adultery: just as before, a thing hard to prove without a spouse’s collusion. And because of the ancient sexual double standard, a wife could get a divorce for her hus- band’s proven adultery only if he also had engaged in one of the following: “incest, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, desertion, rape,” or extreme physical violence (Stetson, 18-19; Holcombe, 99, 103). In the year after this weak- ened legislation, W. J. Fox deplored its narrow grounds. He urged Parlia- ment to make “incompatibility” enough for formally dissolving a marriage (Holcombe, 103-05). But legislators balked even at moderate reform until long after Gissing’s death. The Matrimonial Causes Act (1923) allowed women as well as men divorce for adultery without other factors (Hol- combe, 103), though proof remained difficult. In 1937 Parliament at last al- lowed divorces without the proof of adultery, adding the alternate grounds of cruelty, three years’ desertion, or incurable insanity (Holcombe, 105). Finally, in 1967 Parliament moved somewhat closer to Fox’s mere “incom- patibility” by making “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” grounds for divorce. Yet even so, the secular judges interpreted this language in an old restrictive way as referring just to adultery, physical assault, or desertion. On the other hand, a two-year legal separation could also now provide grounds for divorce, though only if both parties agreed. And even with a five-year separation, the courts refused to issue a divorce if either party showed that it would do serious harm (Holcombe, 107). The long-lasting narrowness of English domestic law sheds light on Gissing’s obsession in his novels with locked-in marriages and the urge to escape them. Workers in the Dawn (1880) portrays in detail a dismally bad mar- riage—that of Arthur Golding to Carrie Mitchell—a pathetically alcoholic ex-prostitute based on Gissing’s first wife. Yet only a minor character, the unpleasant John Waghorn, divorces his wife successfully on the grounds of adultery. She does not exactly collude. She simply runs off and lives with another man. Yet this cynical woman wants a divorce as much as her hus- 3 band does (Pt. 1: 285-87; Pt. 2: 374-76). By contrast, Golding has no legal means of escaping from his wife. In one embarrassing sequence, this locked-in husband conceals his married state and proposes to the idealized heroine, Helen Norman. Here as well as in late-Victorian life, bigamy offers a tempting if a criminal alternative to hard-to-get divorces. When Helen learns that Arthur has a wife already, he argues that love and not a binding ceremony makes one truly married. Still, he had no intention of letting her in on this all-important choice, so that his argument falls apart. In any event, she rejects it for social and moral reasons: “Such theories would result in the destruction of society…” (Pt. 3, 358-59). Considering Golding’s deception of a woman whom he claims to love deeply, his mar- ital philosophy seems hardly more than a selfish rationalization. But it becomes at least more understandable in the light of constrictive domestic English laws. Golding later deserts the deteriorating Carrie and sails away to America, avoiding a legal separation’s delays. He does, though, leave her monthly support. Meanwhile she becomes incurably ill, Golding believes that he can marry Helen soon, but instead she dies herself, and he throws himself into Niagara Falls—an escape from life now and no longer from marriage (Pt. 3, 419-25, 435-36). The Unclassed (1895 revision of 1884 1st ed.) depicts in detail the hellish marriage of Julian Casti—the protagonist’s best friend—to detest- able Harriet Smales—an evil first cousin in a literary sense to pathetic Carrie Mitchell of Workers.